Thursday, November 12, 2009

We are excited to introduce Eat’n Park’s latest and biggest step toward being a greener company and supporting sustainability. This month, we’ll be breaking ground on a brand new Eat’n Park in Fox Chapel. What makes it green? This will be the first LEED-built restaurant in the City of Pittsburgh and only the second in Allegheny County.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification means that the restaurant was designed using strategies aimed at improving energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, and other metrics that are critical to efficient use of natural resources in order to minimize the restaurant’s impact on the environment.

Located in the Waterworks development of Fox Chapel, this new restaurant is scheduled to open in May of 2010. In addition to incorporating elements that will enhance our guests’ experiences (such as a drive-up Pickup Window for takeout and outdoor seating), we’re constructing the building from environmentally-friendly materials, and we’re installing Energy Star-rated equipment throughout.

We’ll also be harvesting natural light through the use of skylights and an exposed lobby structure, allowing us to reduce the power used through electric lights whenever it’s bright outside. The restaurant will be equipped with light sensors to automatically dim the electric lights when it’s bright. Additionally, our parking lot will feature reserved spaces for carpooling and low-emissions vehicles.

If you’ve kept up with Jamie Moore’s posts on sustainability, you know that we’ve been taking steps to reduce our environmental impact by using CFL bulbs in all of our restaurants, recycling fryer oil into bio-diesel fuel, removing placemats and paper towels, and sourcing food locally through our FarmSource program. This new restaurant is a huge step, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

As construction progresses, we’ll be posting updates here. In the meantime, feel free to leave us your thoughts.

9 comments:

Though the entire Fox Chapel area is not within the city of Pittsburgh, our location on Freeport Road is within city limits. So, this will in fact be the first LEED-built restaurant in the City of Pittsburgh.

About the blog

Throughout this blog, we hope to share a bit of our culture with you through stories, recipes, and other information that we think you’ll enjoy. More importantly, we hope you’ll share with us – we want to answer those questions you’ve always had about Eat’n Park (how did we come up with that name, anyway?) and we want to hear your ideas, feedback, and hopefully, a few compliments too!

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